Soldier game model

Dagon

This is around my third try and modelling a soldier that could be usable in a game or put into a game engine, Please help offering suggestions and things I've modelled wrong etc I've been using blender for 5 years but still not as good as all you guys are. I had to remodel the whole soldier at least 3 times since either the geometry was really ugly or I had gotten the method wrong the method I used now is to model everything lower poly although I have heard of the method to model high poly sculpt it nicely and then retopologize but I can't achieve that since I just started sculpting about a week ago. I scrapped the old one because the topology was really bad since I modelled it mostly with subsurf which didn't turn out well and can't be used for games and I had also modelled the body underneath the clothes which made it incredibly annoying since I had to adjust the clothes all the time to solve clipping issues and then I realized I didn't need anything underneath... So I remodelled everything again. The new one has a base mesh head and a basic hand modelled already but I haven't attached them yet because the hands are still "straight" and don't have a natural hand "pose" and the head's neck is too far back making it look weird when connecting it to the body.


Here is my new soldier compared to the old one:

New:







Old:

chrisradsby

How are you going to go about it? These days a lot of the workflow is spent inside sculpting programs. However I think it's starting to look pretty good already just as a low-poly with a diffuse texture on it.

Right of the bat I'd say that I feel like the feet need to be bigger, guess it depends if you're gonna put some boots on the fella Good work so far!

Dagon

Well It is a "base mesh" and what I could do is have the modelled parts done like I have already and then sculpt wrinkles/creases onto the clothes and gear and then bake the normals/AO and then apply to the base mesh that I've already shown? I would sculpt it using Sculptris as blender's sculpting tools don't work properly for me. And about his feet he already has boots on Maybe they are a tad bit too small I'll adjust it and see how it goes.

Dagon

The Scene the soldier might be in:

PaulP

"I had also modelled the body underneath the clothes which made it incredibly annoying since I had to adjust the clothes all the time to solve clipping issues and then I realized I didn't need anything underneath"

I know it can seem easier to model with no body underneath, but if you get into the practice of modelling over a body it can keep you on track to keep your proportions correct, and fit with a character's unique build.

Personally I like to create the body first (or re-use an old model to save time) and extract surfaces off the skin. Then I can expand, retopologize, and deform the extracted surface (clothing) so it adds to the character's underlining muscle definition and body proportions. It also means items like helmets can reference the underlining topology so they fit in at the correct orientation. But everyone works differently

Anyway, the character is looking alright so far, but the tactical waist belt might cause problems during posing and animation on the sides, because if the soldier had to hold and aim his rifle it might clip with the side pouches.

Anyway looking forward to seeing more from you

mjackson126

I think some folds in the cloth, to break up the silhouette might help

Dagon

Thanks for the replies @SCB: I've heard of that method before and that's what I had done before but I had no idea that I had to not worry about the clothes clipping with the body and I had kept the body underneath not knowing it didn't need to be there but this time I used my human model as a reference for proportions and did the clothes without reference except for photos.


I am going to update this post with the head or hands attached hopefully

Dagon

Finally! Attached the head and hands to the body. But I had a lot of trouble with the hands especially with the wrist since I couldn't have more than 8 vertices otherwise the hands wouldn't attach to the wrist without having triangles and thus had to remove the edge loops that rounded the fingers since they ended up raising the amount of vertices at the wrist. As a result I have block-like fingers The hands bug me though since either they're too long and too thin or the arms are too long?